


Two Hundred Fifteen Miles to Boston

by igrockspock



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Female Friendship, Gen, Humor, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:57:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3148310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once Amy spent four hours in a car with Rosa.  It was <em>awesome</em>, thanks to all her checklists and snacks and thoughtfully researched car games.  </p><p>Once Rosa spent four hours in a car with Amy. Amy had a schedule and stupid games and healthy snacks, and it was the worst four hours of Rosa’s life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Two Hundred Fifteen Miles to Boston

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sandyk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandyk/gifts).



> Hi Sandy! I'm sorry that this isn't the Rosa/Amy fic of your dreams, but sadly, that's not what we matched on. I wrote the best friendship story about them I could, and I hope you enjoy it!

Amy Santiago has a road trip manual. She claims it's a checklist, but no, a checklist is at most half a page long, and this is much longer than that.

"No powdered donuts or snacks that leave crumbs," Amy's saying, and Rosa ignores her while she trims her fingernails. The clippers make a little _snick_ noise, and Rosa smirks as Amy shudders at the sound.

"You should also not do _that_ in the car," Amy says, glaring pointedly at the little pile of fingernail clippings on Rosa's desk.

"But it would annoy you so much," Rosa says, and contemplates filing her fingernails into points. But no, that's not very practical. She'd figured that out way back in seventh grade.

Amy's eyes widen. "I've just handed you a weapon, haven't I? I've just told you everything that could possibly annoy me for four hours in a car."

Rosa smirks, but on the inside, she's disappointed. She'd tuned Amy out after number three. It's not like her to let an opportunity like that slip away.

The truth is, Rosa has a checklist too. It goes like this: toothbrush, extra underwear, tampons, black eyeliner. If she forgets anything else, she can buy it. They're going to a female police officers’ conference in Boston, not armageddon.

***

Amy arrives the nine-nine on Wednesday morning with a two suitcases in matching floral print, a wicker basket filled with snacks and lined with a red-checkered cloth, and an imposingly thick yellow legal pad clutched in her hand. Rosa catches a glimpse of check boxes outlined in pristine green ink and forces herself to look away.

“I’m driving,” she says as she yanks the keys out of Amy’s stupid old lady purse.

Amy opens and closes her mouth. “I -- but -- it’s my car. We agreed, one hour shifts with ten minute bathroom breaks in between.”

“Whatever, dork,” she says. The important thing is that the keys are in her hand, and once they get on the road, Amy can’t take them back without causing an accident.

Amy huffs for a minute before her face relaxes into a grin. “That’s alright. It’ll be easier to manage the trip from the passenger side anyway. See, I’ve broken it into thirty minute intervals with a game and a snack for each.” 

She flashes the legal pad at Rosa, who contemplates setting it on fire. But no, Amy will probably just smile brightly and pull out a backup copy, and if she doesn’t, she’ll probably start crying, and Rosa won’t be able to flush her head down the toilet while also driving. She’s been beaten. This time, anyway.

***

Amy angles her body toward the driver’s seat as much as she can without unbuckling her seatbelt. The yellow legal pad is balanced on her knee.

“The first game is called odd-colored car.” She winces. “I know that’s not a very good name, but I couldn’t think of a better one last night. Anyway, we’ll each pick a weird color for a car like orange or yellow or something, and every time you spot one, you get a point. Whoever has the most points at 9:30 wins.”

She flips to the next sheet on her legal pad, which is already divided into a neat grid. One side says ROSA at the top and the other side says AMY. Each column is divided into eight boxes labeled with the name of a game.

“See, every half hour we get a new game, and at the end we’ll total up all the points and see who wins the road trip,” Amy says triumphantly. “Now, what color car do you want?”

“Black,” Rosa says, refusing to take her eyes off the road.

Amy purses her lips. “That’s not really a rare color...but you could do hearses! You look for hearses, I’ll look for yellow cars, and whoever gets the most wins.”

Rosa figures she’ll just ignore the game until the half hour is over, but Amy insists on playing for her, letting out delighted little squeals and making tick marks on Rosa’s half of the page whenever a hearse drives by. It’s actually sort of cute, how she can get so excited about little things like that -- and Rosa’s okay with getting excited about cars full dead people, so it’s not as awful as she thought it might be.

When the half hour is up, Amy’s phone timer dings and she plunges her hand into the basket of snacks.

“Snacks every half hour!” she says, emerging with two little bags of carrot sticks, each labeled with one of their names. “We’ll alternate healthy snacks with junk food.”

“I don’t want breakfast,” she says. “I had coffee.”

Amy opens her mouth to protest, and Rosa glares. “I had coffee and the souls of children.”

The car is quiet after that, except for the sound of Amy crunching through both their bags of carrots like a demented rabbit.

***

The next game is the casserole game. Rosa keeps turning the radio up so she can’t hear the description, but Amy slaps her hand away from the volume knob with surprising force.

“That’s rude,” Amy says levelly, and goes on to explain something about making a list of casserole ingredients that start with every letter of the alphabet. “I’ll go first. I’m making a casserole, and the first ingredient is artichokes.”

Then she looks at Rosa pointedly until Rosa says, “Bitches.”

Amy blinks. “Bitches aren’t a casserole ingredient, Rosa. Maybe you could try broccoli, or brussels sprouts.”

“No, I mean bitches. As in, this is a game for bitches,” Rosa says, and Amy purses her lips.

“Okay, I’ll do that one too. Extra point for me,” she says, making a sharp tick mark on the scoresheet. “I’m making casserole, and the ingredients are artichokes and broccoli. Now you pick something that starts with a C.”

“Cocksucking carpet munchers,” Rosa says.

Amy’s cheeks flush bright red. “I-I’m not going to say that, Rosa. It doesn’t even make sense.”

Rosa grins in the predatory way that always makes Amy flinch. “Dare you,” she says. Amy is sucker for dares.

Sure enough, Amy swallows. “Fine,” she mutters. “I’m making a casserole, and the ingredients are artichokes, broccoli, and” -- she takes a deep breath -- “cocksucking carpet munchers. Happy?”

“Yes,” Rosa says, leaning back into the seat and smiling. “I’m making a casserole, and the ingredients are artichokes, broccoli, cocksucking carpet munchers, and dildos.”

“ _Hey_ , it’s not even your turn. And dildos aren’t even food,” Amy says, stumbling a little bit over the _d-word._

“If you don’t say it, I win,” Rosa says, which doesn’t even make sense when Amy’s keeping score. But Amy hates to lose and is also sometimes illogical, so her plan works.

“Fine. I’m making a casserole, and the ingredients are artichokes, broccoli, cocksucking carpet munchers, dildos, and...eringi mushrooms!” 

“You spend too much time around Charles,” Rosa says. “And the next ingredient is fuck faces.”

By the end of the thirty minutes, she’s gotten Amy to say she’s making an artichoke, broccoli, cocksucking carpet muncher, dildo, eringi, fuckface, garbanzo, hand job, iceberg lettuce, kock sucking karpet muncher, leek, motherfucker, nectarine, orgasm, pear, and queef casserole. 

Amy marks it on the scoresheet as a tie, but Rosa counts it as a win.

***

At 10:30, Rosa wants the chocolate-covered almonds in the bottom of Amy’s snack basket, but Amy says those are the twelve o’clock snacks and offers a baggie of celery sticks instead.

At 11:00 o’clock, Amy pours eighteen paper clips in Rosa’s cup holder and says she has to give one up every time she says a cuss word. Amy has eighteen paper clips of her own, and she’ll forfeit some of them every time she says _please_. Rosa isn’t _trying_ to win, but she does anyway by sitting silently while Amy begs her to play. She says _please_ seventeen times in a row, and then she loses the last paperclip by asking if Rosa would please consider not taking so many of her paperclips.

The 11:30 game is making up weird interpretations for license plate number, which is actually kind of fun, except that Amy makes them stop playing after half an hour so they can eat raisins.

At 12:00, they start playing “Would You Rather.” Rosa’s lips curl into a dangerous smile. She knows this game from drunken nights with her college girlfriends. Amy, apparently, knows it from carefully chaperoned seventh grade student council trips.

“Would your rather stay until eleven o’clock on Friday doing extra reports or lose the captain’s respect forever?” she asks.

“I’d rather not be a little bitch,” Rosa says. “Would you rather forget how to read or shove a pound of Skittles up your ass every Halloween for the rest of your life?”

Amy blanches. “I think you need a therapist, Rosa,” she says, looking very serious. 

The car is silent until they arrive in Boston.

On the way back, Rosa spikes Amy's coffee with Nyquil.

***

She doesn't think about the road trip until three years later, when Captain Holt needs volunteers for an insane eight-day stakeout.

"Four hours is the longest I've ever spent alone with any human, and it was the worst experience of my life," she says. She doesn't really _mean_ anything by it, except that she doesn't want to end up on a stakeout with Boyle, and she'll be really fucking pissed if she has to take that much time off her Giggle Pig task force.

Then Amy turns around says, "We drove to Boston together that one time. That was about four hours." Her face falls. "Oh, I see what just happened here."

She turns around to face the captain again, and for twenty blissful minutes Rosa thinks that's the last she'll have to hear about it.

Then Rosa notices that every time she sits down at her desk, Amy gets up to go to the bathroom. Then Scully offers her some super awkward diarrhea remedy, and Amy has to get more creative with her excuses after that. First she says she's trying some new Japanese method of ritual food consumption that requires her to eat small bites very frequently in the kitchen, but Charles asks too many follow-up questions. Then she says her grandma suffered complications from a laser hair removal procedure and needs to be called three times every hour. Finally, she says her cat ate a pair of panty hose and she keeps calling the vet to see if he'll survive. Holt gives her an actual sympathy card, and after that, she stays at her desk, avoiding eye contact with Rosa.

Rosa can handle that behavior for a maximum of twenty-four minutes, so she stalks over to Amy's desk and says, "I need something from the evidence room."

"That's nice, Rosa," Amy says. She arranges her pencils in neat, parallel lines without looking up.

"The object is heavy and I require your assistance to retrieve it," Rosa says. Amy tries to ignore that, but Rosa just keeps standing in front of her desk, arms crossed over her chest, until Amy sighs and comes with her.

The door of the evidence room is metal, and it shuts behind them with a clank that makes Amy jump. Rosa stands in front of it, barring potential escape, and says, "Why are you avoiding me, dork?"

"I'm not avoiding you," Amy says primly, but she's a horrible liar. "Okay, I'm totally avoiding you. What you said about the trip to Boston? About it being the worst four hours of your life?" Her voice gets squeaky like a dolphin and the words come out in a rush. "I thought we had fun. I thought we were friends."

Which is pretty much the exact answer Rosa had been expecting. She _hates_ being in the wrong, but yeah, that had been a shitty thing to say. She should apologize.

"We are friends, dumb ass," Rosa says, but the wariness doesn't leave Amy's eyes -- which is fair, because it's possible that calling someone _dumb ass_ is not a good apology.

Sometimes she forgets exactly how different she and Amy are. Rosa gets what it's like not to fit in; she remembers moving to some tiny town upstate with her parents when she was seven, and all the perfect blonde girls thought she had weird things in her lunch box and none of them would play with her. She’d hung around their cafeteria table for weeks, trying to insert herself in their conversations. Then she gave up and chopped off Susie Jensen's pigtails and twisted the head off Jennifer Wilson's Barbie, and everyone had been her friend after that -- or at least, they'd let her play with their toys, which is what she really wanted in the first place.

Amy's not like that though. Rosa guesses that Amy hadn't fit in either, but she just kept trying to win people over with her insane enthusiasm and organizational skills. It would be annoying, except that she never asks Rosa to smile more often or act more like other people, and in Rosa’s book, that makes her a pretty good friend -- if she could just chill the fuck out once in awhile, that is.

"Look, you don't have to try so hard all the time, okay?” Rosa says. “It makes things weird. We can just hang out without a schedule or crazy car games or hourly snacks."

Amy frowns. “But we _don’t_ just hang out. You won’t let me come to your apartment, and you didn’t invite me to your birthday party.”

“You would’ve hated my birthday party,” Rosa says. “Did you _want_ to do tequila shots and hook up in the men's room?"

Amy shudders a little bit. "Well, to be honest, that sounds unsanitary and awkward, but I would’ve liked the opportunity say no." 

Rosa restrains herself from rolling her eyes. She’s supposed to invite Amy to things she doesn’t want to do, just so Amy can say no? She doesn’t get pissed off when Amy doesn’t invite her to her crochet circle or doily club or whatever she does in that grandma apartment of hers. People don’t have to spend all their time with their friends.

“I’m not inviting you to stuff just so you can turn me down,” Rosa says, restraining herself from adding _dumb ass_ to the end. Not everyone understands that as a mark of affection. “Look, I keep my work life pretty separate from my personal life, okay? My Uncle Hector was a cop, and he only hung out with other cops. All they ever talked about was the bad shit they saw, and pretty soon he was an asshole. I don’t want to happen to me.”

“You won’t want to be an asshole?” Amy asks, eyebrows raised.

“I don’t,” Rosa says. “That’s why I’m apologizing, dork.”

The truth is, being a female cop is a hard fucking line to walk. Rosa’s a hard ass because her dad almost died crossing the border, and he worked his ass off to get citizenship and bring her mom here so their kids could be born in the United States. But she’s not a hard ass _all_ the time -- she’s got fuzzy slippers in her bedroom and a couple romantic comedies in her DVD collection -- but she doesn’t need other cops in her apartment, going through her shit and declaring some kind of victory because they found a chink in her armor. On her first day at the Academy, some asshole started calling her Two-Fer, as in two-for-one, as in the NYPD could use her to boost their female _and_ minority recruiting statistics. And it was stupid and gross and totally unfounded, but she doesn’t want anyone to even _think_ it’s true, so at work, she pretty much aims for head bitch in charge, all day, every day. Not that that’s much of a stretch for her. The real problem is how to be the HBIC without crossing over to the dark side, which is how she ends up locking her coworkers in the evidence room so she can explain that spending time with them isn’t actually her version of the special hell.

The truth is, she admires Amy for being ridiculously transparent and vulnerable and still somehow being tough enough to advance in the force -- but there’s no way to say that without making it sound like a backhanded compliment, and she’s not built for talking about feelings anyway.

And maybe Amy gets some of that because her face softens, and she says, “I guess I could accept your apology. With a hug, of course.”

Rosa tells herself that Amy’s just trolling, that there’s no way she would demand something as awful as a _hug_ , but Amy advances toward her, smiling beatifically. Rosa stumbles backward into the shelves and closes her fingers around the first thing she finds, which happens to be a tire iron, neatly tagged with the date and time it was used in an aggravated assault. And shit, that _is_ a deadly weapon, and she doesn’t want to _kill_ Amy, but Amy’s getting closer with her arms outstretched -- and at the last moment, she fumbles and grabs the Super Soaker that Terry had confiscated from Jake a few weeks ago.

She pulls the trigger just as Amy’s fingers are closing around her sleeve, and fuchsia-colored water gushes out, soaking Amy’s crisp white blouse. Amy lets out a little shriek and twists Rosa’s wrist so the gun is pointing at the ceiling -- with Rosa’s finger still on the trigger, naturally -- and the pink water bounces off the grungy ceiling tiles and rains down on their heads. Now that Rosa thinks about it, she can remember Terry telling Jake that loading a water gun with pink hair dye was not an acceptable office Halloween prank. Not that that would have changed her decision; she’d still rather be covered with pink hair dye than let another human being hug her.

A second later, the door to the evidence room swings open and Holt stares at them, blinking at the water gun in Rosa’s hand and the stain on the ceiling and the tire iron the floor.

“What is the meaning of this?” he demands, and the ice in his voice makes Rosa’s skin crawl, which pisses her the fuck off. Amy should have _known_ that trying to hug her could only end with violence and mayhem.

“It’s all my fault, sir,” Rosa says without even thinking. “Amy told me not to use the water gun in the bullpen, but I didn’t listen to her. And then I shot her. Because I’m an asshole.”

“I’m very disappointed in you, Detective Diaz,” Holt says. “A note will be made in your file.”

Amy looks over at her, shoulders slumped with relief, and Rosa meets her gaze with a small smile. They both knew the truth: Amy was going to fight her for the gun, the whole evidence room would have been a mess, and they’d both deserve a share of the blame. They _also_ both know that Rosa cares about her job just as much as Amy, and the note in her file stings, even if she doesn’t show it the same way Amy would have. But Rosa’s taking the hit anyway, because they would never have been in here if she hadn’t been mean in the first place -- and anyway, that’s what friends are for.


End file.
